a lazy susan of recipes, food porn, thoughts on sustainable eating, and other tasty tidbits of information revolving between sisters

Tag Archives: san francisco

I spent what might be the ideal local/urban/farming/foodie Saturday in San Francisco during my visit last month. Ferry Building Farmers Market + Alemany Farm + dinner with friends to feast on all our accumulated goods = serious eating happy times.

It started at one of my favorite places of porkaliciousness on the planet, the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market…

Link roundups are awesome. At least the happy faced chocolate chip and vanilla citrus panettone bread pudding from last week’s Rambling Restaurant thinks so. This alleged weekly roundup of link love is not so weekly – right now, we’re going for bi-monthly. Might get worse. May get better (unlikely).

This is awesome – London has city farms all over the place. More American cities should do this, especially with abandoned unused spaces. Great for food production, community involvement, education, improvement of city aesthetics and urban landscape, and general awesomeness. For more on city farms, see below!

Here’s how it works: You pledge a bit of money to support a really cool project. They only take your money if they get enough funding. In return, you get to support a great idea AND you get something in return. A piece of artwork, dinner, a shoutout in a music video, whatever small piece of the project you helped get off the ground according to the level of your donation. For example, you could get an adorable set of seed packets like these for pledging $25:

Or get a gorgeous set of screen-printed posters by one of the farmers who’s also an artist by donating $250.

You can give as little as $5 or as much as you want. Everyone wins! I only wish I could have given $1000 for my very own garden picnic. Someday…when I’m a baller…

the go game is running a street food adventure to celebrate the first san francisco street food festival! talk about an amazing event – it’s the best of san francisco street food, a benefit for the amazing non-profit incubator kitchen la cocina, and a chance for eating-obsessed SFers to show off their foodie knowledge, their devotion to track down the best bites of the SF urban jungle, and most importantly, their crazily culinary creativity.

it’s an online game where people play in teams to solve foodie puzzles online and on the mean streets. teams (with awesome names like soup sluts, trans-fatso’s, and deep fried twinkie) win points for correct answers and also for submitting creative missions which people watch online and score. i ‘ve just barely skimmed the surface of photos and videos submitted by the 277 teams(!) but the current personal favorite of the UK office is this rap about the creme brulee cart by team fatty boombatty. seriously, this video is a delicious work of genius.

creme brulee on the street corner combined with a coolio parody video? that’s some sweet stuff right there. check out the best submissions from the game here and read what an nbc reporter/go game player has to say about the street food obsession here.

we’re so inspired and excited by the overwhelming commitment, competition, and creativity from the SF street food devotees that we’re considering running a london game! what do you think, londoners? are you up for it? we’d have you sampling spinach & agushi and violet cupcakes at broadway market, scarfing down scotch eggs at the upmarket, and of course, diving into a hot cheese avalanche. and you’d solve puzzles, take wacky photos, film short movies, vote online, and have a total blast while filling your belly along the way. no mid- 90’s rap music knowledge required, we’ll find an appropriate equivalent for iconic music videos starring michelle pfeiffer on this side of the pond.

to reverse paraphrase kevin costner: ‘if you will come, we will build it.’ seriously london, if you’d be interested in playing, let me know! i have a serious street food obsession and i think london’s got an absolutely incredible street food and market culture. let’s play with our food!

the go game is running a street food adventure to celebrate the first san francisco street food festival! talk about an amazing event – it’s the best of san francisco street food, a benefit for the amazing non-profit incubator kitchen la cocina, and a chance for eating-obsessed SFers to show off their foodie knowledge, their devotion to track down the best bites of the SF urban jungle, and most importantly, their crazily culinary creativity.

it’s an online game where people play in teams to solve foodie puzzles online and on the mean streets. teams (with awesome names like soup sluts, trans-fatso’s, and deep fried twinkie) win points for correct answers and also for submitting creative missions which people watch online and score. i ‘ve just barely skimmed the surface of photos and videos submitted by the 277 teams(!) but the current personal favorite of the UK office is this rap about the creme brulee cart by team fatty boombatty. seriously, this video is a delicious work of genius.

creme brulee on the street corner combined with a coolio parody video? that’s some sweet stuff right there. check out the best submissions from the game here and read what an nbc reporter/go game player has to say about the street food obsession here.

we’re so inspired and excited by the overwhelming commitment, competition, and creativity from the SF street food devotees that we’re considering running a london game! what do you think, londoners? are you up for it? we’d have you sampling spinach & agushi and violet cupcakes at broadway market, scarfing down scotch eggs at the upmarket, and of course, diving into a hot cheese avalanche. and you’d solve puzzles, take wacky photos, film short movies, vote online, and have a total blast while filling your belly along the way. no mid- 90’s rap music knowledge required, we’ll find an appropriate equivalent for iconic music videos starring michelle pfeiffer on this side of the pond.

to reverse paraphrase kevin costner: ‘if you will come, we will build it.’ seriously london, if you’d be interested in playing, let me know! i have a serious street food obsession and i think london’s got an absolutely incredible street food and market culture. let’s play with our food!

my mother has been working at the same building at MIT medical my entire life. that’s 27 years (as of last week…yeeesh) that i have been visiting or picking her up on the same exact street in cambridge upon which there have never before been big white street food trucks serving freshly made locally sourced meals. and all of a sudden, i pop into boston for three days and here you are, delightful clover food truck. so happy to make your acquaintance.

if you don’t obsessively follow the san francisco food scene from halfway around the world like i do, you may not know that street food is big these days. it used to be just the taco trucks and the tamale lady when you were drunk at zeitgeist. now everything from soup to salami and curry to creme brulee is being sold from carts and bikes and trucks and hovercraft all over the city. okay, maybe not the last part, but that would be pretty sweet. anyway, the SF street food scene has seriously blown up recently, as have the NYC and LA scenes, many of whom release their locations in real-time via twitter. even from london, i know exactly when a delicious fatty cured pig part sandwich goes on sale at a random intersection in san francisco and i can only mourn that i’m about 6,000 miles too far away to get in line. it’s gotten so big that it’s even spawned a backlash of anti-street-food-fad-sentiment. yes, you know things have gotten big when the haters come out to play. but ignore them and revel in the excitement that is street food. beyond all the tastiness, what’s particularly exciting is that the amazing people at la cocina are organizing a street food festival and the go game is running a street food themed scavenger hunt! if you’re anywhere near san francisco, go sign up to play because it’s going to be AMAZING.

anyway. talking about street food gets me so excited that i’ve lost track of the original topic of this post, which was intended to be the excellent clover food truck. hooray boston for not letting sf, nyc, and la grab all the attention and making an impressive showing of your own.

for my super final ultimate san francisco post, i will leave you with photos of one of my super final ultimate last meals in the city, which might also be my ultimate last meal on earth before walking to the gallows or whatever. welcome to the ham and cheese croissant to destroy all other ham and cheese croissants, courtesy of an establishment that was formerly my downstairs neighbor but currently only resides in my fantasies – tartine bakery.

this is, no joke, the best ham and cheese croissant you will ever have in your life. warm, buttery, with a crisply delicate outer structure that you bite through to a firm but yielding center of melted cheese and tangy ham, sending flaky shards to sprinkle your shirt with signs of recently consumed deliciousness.

next up, good morning morning bun! this lovely item graced the top 100 items to eat in SF before you die because it is FUCKING AMAZING. sweet and crunchy with a hint of orange, it will leave you with a big sugary smile of ecstasy and smeared gooeyness.

i also brought in rich chocolate and subtly almond frangipane croissants along with the morning buns for my very last go game meeting in san francisco.

hellooooo my darlings. you will soon be eaten and then i will have to say goodbye. goodbye to you and the go game and san francisco! but don’t worry. i will be back someday, sooner than you think, for my fix of ham and cheese and the entire beautiful city…

i’ve been wanting to go to minako organic on mission for years now, and just managed to sneak a visit in before leaving SF. my friend and delicious-food-and-alcohol-overconsumption partner-in-crime julie went recently and had the best time eating vegetarian sushi and chatting with judy, the good-lord-you’re-adorable server/daughter of the owner, so we went back on one of my last nights in town. the food is absolutely amazing – i’ll get to that in a second. ok, i guess i’ll let you see a photo first. feast your eyes on this crispy potato wrapped shrimp:

good lord. i would not complain if someone wanted to wrap everything i own in crispy deep fried potato strings as an april fool’s joke. anyone? anyone? anyway, the reason i’m not focusing on the food at first is because there are all these cute personal touches that made me truly adore the place. first off, check out the colorful handwritten specials board with little japanese food magnets. i am a total sucker for this shit:

i spent my last weekend in san francisco enjoying the first sunny weekend of the year. over the last few years of living in the mission, some of my best times have been spent picnicking with friends while people-watching and day-drinking the hours away at dolores park. there’s always ample sources of entertainment there including, but certainly not limited to, chocolate marijuana truffles, glue and lentil wrestling in kiddie pools, naked slip’n’slides, sf cop run-ins, a hunky jesus contest, and so much more. a view of the packed saturday park hustle and bustle:

there is an insane amount of delicious food available within a one-block radius of the park. i stopped at bi-rite on the way over and got neon green and fruity so-hot-right-now casteveltrano olives and some nutty ewetopia cheese. julie and nadja, champion day drinkers, handled the peach mango mimosas:

mimosa in hand, i also caught up with allan from mission mission and met a powerhouse crew of local eaters including john from burrito justice and ashley from mission pie. we all happened to catch the future hula-hooping world champion demolish her struggling male companion in a mano-a-mano battle. it was a hilarious scene and the surrounding crowd gave her a few rounds of applause in acknowledgement of her talents. i always love those great instances where a whole bunch of strangers join in on appreciating a singularly unexpected public moment, something we try to achieve as much as possible with the go game.

thanks to john from burrito justice for the cool moving photo action and some good conversation. i may be in touch about airmailing a cancun burrito over to the UK soon…

i hit up mission street foodagain on thursday with my girl julie. julie is one of my favorite people in the world despite her being a vegetarian and ‘forcing’ me to eat all the delicious meat dishes by myself.

the guest chef on thursday was mari takahashi of sozai restaurant and sake lounge in the inner sunset. i would like to adopt mari and install her in my kitchen as the benevolent goddess of porky love. her MSF menu included THREE kinds of pork product which i had to eat ALL BY MYSELF. poor me. i actually went through the charade of questioning whether i could actually eat it all and reminding myself out loud that i could always take home any leftovers. then i totally destroyed all three dishes on the solo tip because i am into over-the-top gluttony like that.

i started with the bacon xiao long bao, which are shanghai soup dumplings that i got obsessed with when living in nyc chinatown after graduating college. it’s a steamed dumpling typically filled with a super intensely porky broth that is best eaten by putting it in a soup spoon and poking with a chopstick so some of the juice leaks out and cools off and you don’t get a first mouthful of boiling hot magma-style liquid. these soup dumplings were made with bacon (i am seriously on bacon overload) and were served in adorably multicolored silicone cupcake liners:

these soup dumplings weren’t the best i’ve ever had (my faves are from nice green bo, formerly new green bo, downstairs from my old apartment in chinatown), with a slightly drier wrapper and less tasty broth inside, but they added an exciting element with the salty smokiness of the bacon. definitely worth a try.

we also started with olives, the smaller darker lucque and my favorite bright green castelvetrano, and a bottle of wine from julie. oh herro.